It's been a long, cold, snowy, bully of a winter, and it's not over yet. But we have hope in southwest Minnesota.
"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's happening! New birds have arrived in our neighborhood--red-breasted robins hopping on the brown patches of grass showing through the melting snow, Phoebes singing their sweet "Phee-bee, Phee-bee" song in the trees, geese flying and honking their hearts out overhead in those lovely, fluid V-formations. Purple crocuses are popping up in the south-facing garden next to our home.
It's been a long, cold, snowy, bully of a winter, and it's not over yet. But we have hope in southwest Minnesota. "Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I love the way Jeff Worley's poem emerged from a turtle shell he found, and I especially like the unexpected image of the unencumbered, naked turtle dancing under the moon--marvelous. American Life in Poetry: Column 256 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE A poem is an experience like any other, and we can learn as much or more about, say, an apple from a poem about an apple as from the apple itself. Since I was a boy, I’ve been picking up things, but I’ve never found a turtle shell until I found one in this poem by Jeff Worley, who lives in Kentucky. On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest This one got tired of lugging his fortress wherever he went, was done with duck and cover at every explosion through rustling leaves of fox and dog and skunk. Said au revoir to the ritualof pulling himself together. . . I imagine him waiting for the cover of darkness to let down his hinged drawbridge. He wanted, after so many protracted years of caution, to dance naked and nimble as a flame under the moon-- even if dancing just once was all that the teeth of the forest would allow. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Jeff Worley, whose most recent book of poems is Best to Keep Moving, Larkspur Press, 2009, which includes this poem. Reprinted from Poetry East, Nos. 62 & 63, Fall, 2008, by permission of Jeff Worley and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. On oprah.com, there's a good interview with poet Mary Oliver--"Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver." Here's an excerpt:
Maria Shriver: One line of yours I often quote is, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" What do you think you have done with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver: I used up a lot of pencils. Maria Shriver: [Laughs.] Mary Oliver: What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy. And I learned to consider my life an amazing gift. Those are the things. Today I'm posting a poem I love from Krista Tippett's on Being program this week, "A Wild Love for the World," with Rainer Maria Rilke poems translated by Joanna Macy, a philosopher of ecology and a Buddhist scholar: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/wild-love-for-world/ Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. Book of Hours, I 59 Today you could see every shade of green being worn in the halls at SMSU. In Marshall, even though our population tops out at about 12,000, we have a St. Patrick's Day parade down Main Street--short but spirited. Every year I celebrate the day by baking a loaf of Irish Soda Bread and playing our Irish/Celtic music CD's.
Two years ago, I visited Ireland for the first time--a magical return to the homeland of my great grandparents, the O'Connell's. My husband and I were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary, and we toured Dublin, Kilkenny, Killarney, Valencia Island--where Great Grandfather Thomas O'Connell lived--and the Skelligs. So much beautiful poetry, literature and music honored and woven into the everyday fabric wherever we travelled, from the airport to the welcoming pubs to the wonderful bookstores. Who are your favorite Irish poets? Past and present? I like poems by Irish poet, writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1995) Seamus Heaney. Here is one of his most popular poems, particularly suited to writers and the digging we do. Digging Between my finger and my thumb The squat pin rest; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. - Seamus Heaney Today was beautiful in Marshall--brilliant sunshine warming the thawing prairie, temps climbing up into the 40's, the ring of brown grass around our towering backyard fir tree growing wider, the dirty snow mounds almost melting in front of our eyes. In Minnesota, we are all so hungry for the sights, smells, sounds of spring. Time for a spring poem by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets.
Such Singing in the Wild Branches It was spring and finally I heard him among the first leaves-- then I saw him clutching the limb in an island of shade with his red-brown feathers all trim and neat for the new year. First, I stood still and thought of nothing. Then I began to listen. Then I was filled with gladness-- and that's when it happened, when I seemed to float, to be, myself, a wing or a tree-- and I began to understand what the bird was saying, and the sands in the glass stopped for a pure white moment while gravity sprinkled upward like rain, rising, and in fact it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing-- it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers, and also the trees around them, as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds in the perfectly blue sky— all, all of them were singing. And, of course, yes, so it seemed, so was I. Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn't last for more than a few moments. It's one of those magical places wise people like to talk about. One of the things they say about it, that is true, is that, once you've been there, you're there forever. Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then— open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song may already be drifting away. — Mary Oliver Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 2003, pp. 8-9 Jim Reese gave a terrific reading at SMSU tonight--beautiful, powerful poems, equal parts humor--about lingerie catalogs--and gut-punching pathos--about his work teaching prisoners writing. He read poems from his new book, ghost on 3rd (click on book title to read the review in the American Poetry Journal), brand new unpublished poems, and a rollicking new piece of non-fiction about budding teenage sexuality in all its steamy, innocent indoor-roller-rink glory.
Jim is the founder and editor of Paddlefish, a publication of Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota. Here's a poem from the most recent issue of Paddlefish by Leo Dangel, beloved professor emeritus of SMSU. Leo always filled the house when he gave readings on campus--with faculty, students, staff, and people from the surrounding communities. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser wrote of Dangel's book of collected poems, Home from the Field, "These poems are warm and generous and perfectly formed to the mouths of the people who speak them.” Independent Harvester If our oats crop was ripe on the 4th of July, there was no liberty for us. My father pulled the grain binder out from its place under a cottonwood tree, the sickle sharpened and fierce. Our uniform was faded cotton and straw hats. My mother drove the rusty tractor, and my father operated the binder, the sickle rattling back and forth, sounding like a machine gun, mowing down the standing grain in its path. My sisters and I set the bundles into shocks that covered the field in rows of monuments. No one thought of Washington or flags. I remember how the water, kept cool in a Mason jar under a shock, tasted, how the stubble felt when it bent and broke under my soles. The hemp twine that tied our harvest together had a certain smell. We saw the late sun slanting on the field. Here's this week's American Life in Poetry: Column 312. I love the images in this poem and where it takes the reader.
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006 Ellery Akers is a California poet who here brings all of us under a banner with one simple word on it. The Word That Is a Prayer One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says, Please. By the time you hear what he’s saying, the light changes, the cab pulls away, and you don’t go back, though you know someone just prayed to you the way you pray. Please: a word so short it could get lost in the air as it floats up to God like the feather it is, knocking and knocking, and finally falling back to earth as rain, as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch, collecting in drains, leaching into the ground, and you walk in that weather every day. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1997 by Ellery Akers, whose most recent book of poetry is Knocking on the Earth, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Reprinted from The Place That Inhabits Us, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010, by permission of Ellery Akers and the publishers. Introduction copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. What is literary citizenship? Creative writing teacher Cathy Day believes, "There are many ways to lead a literary life, and I try to show my students simple ways that they can practice what I call 'literary citizenship.' I wish more aspiring writers would contribute to, not just expect things from, that world they want so much to be a part of."
Day, who teaches at Ball State University and has published two books, has a great article that lists her principles of literary citizenship. Good food for thought for all of us who seek not only to publish but to be part of a healthy, thriving and supportive literary community. Here's a terrific post (which writer Rebecca Fjelland Davis posted via Rachael Hanel, thank you both!) from www.poynter.org that lists 7 tips that The King's Speech (if you haven't seen it yet, GO!) teaches us about how to make our stories matter. I plan to share these with my creative writing students at SMSU.
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AuthorI love to play with words. To capture moments on the page. To explore the physical and spiritual geography of what I call "fly-over country." I write from imagination, observation and my own experience of wandering in fly-over country--the literal, physical spaces of my life on the Minnesota prairie and the inner territory of the soul. Archives
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